E. Coli deadly because veggies eaten raw?

[toml]

Is the reason the E. Coli that was found in Spinach and now in Taco Bell's scallions deadly because people were eating them raw?

If you cook it (after washing of course) then the bacteria should be gone right?

[vsoy]

The E.coli that killed people is deadly because it is a strain or variety that makes the deadly toxin. The E.coli that is in your stomach or hanging out on the table don't make this toxin and they generally makeup the majority of the bacteria out there.

It's when this bad strain comes along and lands on a cow carcass destined for Jack-In-the-Box patties or poo water to irrigate or wash veggies in combination with poor food sanitation practices that you get deadly outbreaks.

If given the opportunity, the bad E.Coli will grow and multiply. Poor food practices like not washing foods or letting contaminated foods touch common surfaces (hands, bowls, knives, cutting boards) spread these bad bugs to other foods. Washing food is a way to mechanically remove the majority of the bacteria. Throughly cooking food will kill bacteria. Most toxins are proteins and they can be inactivated by heat. The trick is to throughly cook all of the food all the way through.

So if the food is not washed well and people are eating contaminated food raw, they'll eating a hellalot of bad bacteria. When the food is contaminated but not all the way cooked, there's a few bad bacteria hanging around and if the food is left on the table for a period of time, those bugs can multiply and grow. When you go to eat it for snack later, you're eating a lot of bad bacteria. When you get a doggie bag from the restaurant, try to get it into the fridge as soon as possible which is not the easiest thing to do on a romantic or celebratory dinner.

This article was about how the toxin does it dirty work:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/850905.stm

I was throughly grossed out while helping family making Thanksgiving dinner. One person was shelling chestnuts and throwing moldy nuts in the bowl we were going to use for stuffing. Another person was snacking off of leftover stuffing that didn't make it into the bird. I was food nazi, enforcing the rules and picking over, tossing out bad things.

[ellencho]

I love threads that lead to discussions about poo.

[toml]

Thanks for the info vsoy

It's crazy that now even eating veggies can kill you. I mean, I can understand the dangers of meat and stuff, but veggies?? Crazy...

[Hater Depot]

Why are proteins inactivated by heat? Does it change their shape?

[ellencho]

Thanks for the info vsoy

It's crazy that now even eating veggies can kill you. I mean, I can understand the dangers of meat and stuff, but veggies?? Crazy...
It's not the veggies themselves, it's the poor sanitation that occurs prior to them arriving on your plate.

Why are proteins inactivated by heat? Does it change their shape?
Heat can denature some proteins, meaning that the heat changes the structure of the molecule. But some proteins are more heat stable than others and heat won't do much to render them nonfunctional.

[toml]

It's not the veggies themselves, it's the poor sanitation that occurs prior to them arriving on your plate.

Ah... right, right.

Do you know if the agricultural practices in the US is the same in other countries? Because I don't think I've ever heard of this veggie scare in other places.

It amazes me that for how advanced the US farming methods are, this would be the result.

[ellencho]

It's not the veggies themselves, it's the poor sanitation that occurs prior to them arriving on your plate.

Ah... right, right.

Do you know if the agricultural practices in the US is the same in other countries? Because I don't think I've ever heard of this veggie scare in other places.

It amazes me that for how advanced the US farming methods are, this would be the result.
You know, now that I think about it, me neither. I'm sure it does happen, but maybe it just isnt' newsworthy enough in the states? The last food poisoning thing I remember hearing about were those poisoned sesame buns that killed little kids out in PRC, and that wasn't agriculture related.

I can't answer your question about agricultural practices in or outside of the US, but if you think about all those farmers who sell direct to the public in open-air markets all over asia, who don't deal with distributors and middlemen, they must be doing something the US isn't doing.

[toml]

You know, now that I think about it, me neither. I'm sure it does happen, but maybe it just isnt' newsworthy enough in the states? The last food poisoning thing I remember hearing about were those poisoned sesame buns that killed little kids out in PRC, and that wasn't agriculture related.

Yeah, most of the food scares in Asia are more sanitation related. China has some of the worst offenses. My mom won't buy any canned goods or even preserved stuff from China. She'll only get stuff from Taiwan, Japan, or Korea.



I can't answer your question about agricultural practices in or outside of the US, but if you think about all those farmers who sell direct to the public in open-air markets all over asia, who don't deal with distributors and middlemen, they must be doing something the US isn't doing.

LOL at the open-air markets. Some of those places seem really dirty, and yet, I've never heard of anyone getting a disease from buying from there. And they even sell fish and other seafoods there! All they have to keep the fish cool is buckets of ice, that's it! Crazy...

Perhaps being exposed to this at an early age makes people more resiliant to bacteria?

Didn't someone speculate the reason Korea didn't have a SARS epidemic is because of all the kimchi they eat? Heehee...

[ellencho]

Also, you dont' really hear about people in asia having seasonal allergies until they move here. I wonder if that's somehow connected.

[vsoy]

I'm not an agricultural expert but from what I understand, the production scale and techniques used by US farmers to grow veggies and animals is quite different from other countries. Food production in US is huge yield in huge fields and the only way this was achieved the past 50 years is tons of pesticides and antibiotics on varieties of plants and animals suited for US tastes and transportation.

You hear about how chickens, cows and pigs are raised in US, in small boxes, thousands of them in a processing facility. Like visiting folks during the holidays, someone is bound to get sick when surrounded by so many others. Farmers feed animals antibiotics as a preventative measure against sickness. Many of the varieties of animals (like turkeys) grown in the US are pretty sickly types that make a lot of meat but need a lot of antibiotics to stay healthy. Some people argue the poo water from antibiotic-feed animals get into ground water and cause downstream effects in addition to selecting for antibiotic resistant bacterial strains. Heheh ellen, another poo related sidebar :P

Where the food is grown is often hundreds of miles away so contaminated foods that are not stored properly during transit, have a couple of days to fester and a couple more days in the supermarket.

While the factory methods of US farmers have fed millions of people at a low cost to the consumer and the farmer, these methods have serious consequences when safety guidelines are breached because so many people will eat the food.

I would think the open air markets are significantly smaller scale farmers who don't use the same techniques and even varieties of animals and plants. And when these small scale farmers screw up, it's only a few people who get sick but I think the fact that the food gets processed and consumed quickly, there are fewer opportunities for bad bacteria to multiply. Probably the varieties of plants and animals grown by these farmsers are a lot more healthy and vigorous than the behemoths grown in the US.

[vsoy]

Also, you dont' really hear about people in asia having seasonal allergies until they move here. I wonder if that's somehow connected.
A lot of what you're exposed to (rather NOT exposed to) while you're young has a big effect on allergies. Not a lot of lawns in Asia and urban parts of US like NYC so ragweed and type of pollen are totally new for the immune systems of these people.

While China's rapidly growing middle class, food production practices are changing to keep up with demand. There'll probably be more outbreaks and scares and people have to be careful. Another big problem in China I see is unscrupulous people using bad, substandard ingredients not fit for human consumption in food products like powdered milk, soy sauce and cooking lard. Recently someone was busted for using sewage treated fat in cooking lard. Ugh! Makes you think twice about buying food from China.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/world/asia/05beijing.html

[toml]

It's a bit shocking that the more "advanced" the farming practices usually means the less healthy.

Aside from the chickens that are packed side-by-side, I've read that cows are pumped with growth hormones so that they not only produce milk year round, but also more meat for later...

(which makes you wonder if the GH can possibly leak over to humans?)

[Hater Depot]

Do you know if the agricultural practices in the US is the same in other countries? Because I don't think I've ever heard of this veggie scare in other places.

Over the summer there was a scare in South Korea when a few hundred kids got sick from the spinach in their school lunches (as I recall). They never found out exactly what it was that made them sick but CJ Foods lost their contract to supply school lunches.

[minbo]

Food contamination happen all over the world, we just don't hear about it in the US because the US news doesn't care about it. Some other reasons that you don't hear about it as much is:

1) Only in the more industrialized countries do people consume food that has been grown/produced in a large centralized scale and shipped about. In less developed nations, when there is an incident, because their scale of production is smaller, their food contamination affects far fewer people.
2) Only countries with well developed health care systems and health monitoring will identify food borne illnesses, let alone correlate dispersed cases to identify that there is a problem.
3) In combination with the health monitoring, only countries with developed produce tracking systems will be able to track the problem identified in 2 to a specific food type or source.

[Dialectic]

vsoy's absolutely right. There's a great article here. The problems are apparently only going to get worse:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/12/07/pollan_bad_food/